4 comments:

Not sure that I find a light rail (i.e. streetcar) for 42nd St. offensive. After all, the street once had streetcars in the past. It's always seemed to me that midtown could really use a more efficient crosstown transit link, especially for areas east and west of the subways, and anything that replaces buses with non-polluting vehicles seems like a net gain to me.

The monorail across 42nd Street is an idea, as suggested by the Times piece, that is at least a decade old. Of course, there is already a crosstown rail option along 42nd Street: it's called the 7 train, and if Bloomberg wasn't obsessed with pouring all the city's transportation funds into just the extension station being built at 34th and 11th (for a "neighborhood" which may never exist), a station would also have been added at 42nd and 11th.

The fact that 7 train extension to the Javitz Center, and, more importantly, to the nearby yet-to-be-developed big rail yards parcel, is being built without any intervening stations for the under-served current residents of densely populated Hell's Kitchen shows as clearly as anything I can think of just where the priorities of this administration and their friends in the MTA lie.

Them boys in Bayside are the most dangerous and backwards of all. The city should toughen inspections for medical, psychiatric and vehicle reasons to cut down the number of congestion. This way, we will also get the voters against congestion pricing, who live in Bayside and Staten Island, to move away. Free health care means psychiatric care for all those angry talk radio white males! They are all overweight from driving around too much, burdening the city health system!